SURVEY on... Public health risk reductions - prevention

Abstract

One instance of the online survey involving choice experiments concerning public health risk reductions. This version is actually one branch within a survey that included either a “prevention” or a “treatment” branch, with the preliminary and following questions being identical across the two versions. This “prevention” variant employed choice tasks concerning environmental policies that would reduce specific categories of pollutants that cause different specific types of illness. Policies varied in terms of the number of years they would remain in effect, how many people would get sick with and without the policy, how many would die with and without the policy, and the cost to the respondent. There were actually four variations on this survey. The fullest version included information on both illnesses and deaths, and included information about how many people would get sick or die both without and with the policy. The minimal version omitted information about illnesses, mentioning only deaths, and excluded information about how many people would die both without and with the policy mentioning instead just how many fewer illnesses and deaths would result if the policy were adopted. Both this “prevention” version of the public health risks survey and the associated “treatment” version included a trailing question designed to elicit individual discount rates.